I’m doing something slightly different tomorrow: I’m splicing up the sermon with two DVD clips from Fresh Expressions: the first, from their DVD 1, is of ‘Messy Church’, and the second, from DVD 2, is from the chapter on rural mission about ‘The Gathering’ in the Whitby Methodist Circuit. We’re then showing as much of DVD 1 as we can get through while people have coffee after the service. Then folk are invited to a ploughman’s lunch, where we hope they will discuss what they see at their tables, and record their thoughts (anonymously, if so desired) on small wipeable whiteboards.
Introduction
Sunday 22nd July: can I be the first this year to wish you a very
Happy Christmas?
You probably think I’ve finally lost it – if indeed I ever
had ‘it’. Did you wonder why we heard a ‘Christmas’ Bible reading – the first
eighteen verses of John chapter one? What has that to do with a morning when I
shall give over two quarters of the sermon to DVD clips from Fresh Expressions about new ways
of mission and church with children and families? Wouldn’t it have made more
sense if we had read Jesus’ words about letting the children come to him?
Well, it might have done – but some words in that famous
Prologue to John’s Gospel are central to the different way of doing mission and
church that I have been emphasising ever since coming here. You can find it
distilled in verse 14:
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
The Word became flesh and lived among us. Here are two other
ways of translating it. More literally, it is, ‘The Word became flesh and
pitched his tent among us.’ Or Eugene
Peterson paraphrases it, ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into
the neighbourhood.’ Simply put, I believe those words do two things: they
change our focus, and they change our order of priorities. We’ll briefly
consider the change of focus first, and then see the first DVD clip; then we’ll
think about the changing of our order of priorities, and then see the second
DVD clip.
1. Change Of Focus
The change of focus is from ‘come’ to ‘go.’ We have assumed that mission is
about getting people to come to us. But Jesus didn’t do that: ‘the Word became
flesh and lived among us.’ He moved into the neighbourhood. Relying on a ‘come
to us’ approach to mission brings fewer and fewer people into the orbit of
God’s love. In a passage where he explains that eighty per cent of people find
faith in Christ through friendship with Christians, Jeff Lucas summarises the futility of the
‘come to us’ approach to mission this way:
It’s like a fisherman spreading his expensive net on the side
of the riverbank, and then inviting the fish to jump out of the water and get
caught.
(Gideon:
Power From Weakness, p61)
Yet we persist in getting out our ever-more-fancy fishing
nets every week. Yet not only did Jesus himself model a mission based on
‘going’, he told his disciples to model their involvement in mission on his:
‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’ (John 20:21). Mission involves being
part of the community, researching its culture and needs, and then finding appropriate
ways of sharing the Good News in word and deed.
So, although Christian mission will occasionally involve the
use of a church building (as it does in the two clips we’re going to see) it
mostly happens away from our gathering place. Mission is not about bringing
people into the increasingly unfamiliar culture of the church and expecting
them to fit our shape: it’s about being in the world, finding the points where
the Gospel makes contact and the points where it challenges. You’ll see a lot
of examples in the clips we’re going to run over coffee between the end of the
service and our lunch together, but for now let’s see our first clip.
2. Changing The Order
Of Our Priorities
Put these three words in order of priority: Jesus, church and mission. It’s a
fair bet that most of us would put them in that order: Jesus first, then
church, and finally mission. But it’s not the way it happens in John’s Gospel,
or in the New Testament generally.
Everything begins with Jesus. Christianity is centred on a
personal and shared knowledge and experience of Jesus Christ and his saving
love. If we don’t start with Jesus, we’re in trouble. Those who might put
‘church’ first tend to be devoted to the institution and its rituals, not to
its Founder. Without making the connection with Jesus personal, there is no
Christian faith. It all starts with him, as it does here: ‘the Word became
flesh.’
But ‘church’ doesn’t come second. ‘The Word became flesh and
lived among us.’ ‘Mission’ comes next. The result of Jesus coming was mission.
He brought God’s love into the world. Anyway, you can’t have church if mission,
hasn’t happened, where people find the God’s love for themselves.
‘Church’ comes third. It is the fruit and consequence of
mission. When we place church ahead of mission we just end up with church as a
therapeutic community where the important thing is for me to have my needs met
(see Mike
McNichols and Brother Maynard).
In such places, mission becomes the preserve of the enthusiastic few, and not
central to the life of the church. When we focus on church, we don’t usually
manage to build community; often, we destroy it. When we focus on mission, we
gather together as a group and end up functioning as the community we were
always meant to be. (See Michael
Frost, Exiles,
for further on this.)
So the community of the church arises both as the fruit of mission – people are gathered
together under the reign of God – and the passion
of mission – a shared commitment to mission draws people together into deep
Christian community.
So we need to reorder our priorities. Our priorities cannot
be about the building. Nor can they be about so filling up people’s diaries
with meetings that they can spend little meaningful time in the community. Our
church priorities are simple: gathering for worship, a small group where we
challenge one another to grow in discipleship, and only as much other business
as is absolutely necessary.
In fact, that small group might most profitably be people
who come together to work on mission – sharing God’s love in word and deed with
those yet to find that love. Within that you find the fellowship to sustain you
in Bible study, discipleship and mutual pastoral care.
You’re probably bored with me talking about it, but my best
experience of this was when I was involved in my first appointment with
ecumenical youth worship and outreach. As a team we met in three different
configurations, each with slightly different memberships. We were a group that
met to pray and strategise for this ministry. We were a fortnightly home group,
where we studied the Bible and supported one another. And we hung out as a
bunch of friends on Friday nights, with pizzas, videos and some non-Methodist
liquids. The mission energised everything else.
But enough from me: time for our second DVD clip.
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